[CIA]

My trusty wired router finally died after 6 years, so I'm in the market for a new one.
I was running a Siemens router, with several machines hard wired, and also attached an airportExtreme basestation for wireless access and for music. Basically, everything worked as it should.

My old network:
Modem -->Wired Router --> Several wired machines & one Airport Express basestation. (basestation wired to the router) The AE basestation was set to not distribute IP's. If you connected using wireless, your machine got an IP from the wired router just fine. Everything could network with each other, and you could stream music from iTunes to the Stereo next to the AirPort Express regardless of being wired or wireless.

I got a netgear wireless router, 54g, but for some reason networking and airtunes would not work with it. Even if I turned off the wireless on the Netgear, and tried the same setup I had before, appletalk and airtunes was a no-go. Internet did work tho.

I need a new wired router, with all the firewall/security features you would expect, that will work well with appletalk and airtunes. That way I can just go back to the setup I had before and be happy again. Mixed PC and Mac environment.

p.s. Bonus points if it has gigabit ethernet.

Thanks in advance.

[ghporter]

AirTunes is an AirPort hardware function. With just the wired portion of the Netgear working, it SHOULD let you do everything as before, but there's probably some sort of port issue going on.

Linksys routers have always worked well for me. No guarantee that AppleTalk will work with any modern, non-Apple equipment though, because AppleTalk is an antique that even Apple doesn't do much to support anymore. Everything you can do with AT you can do with Samba or other native ethernet protocol with the bonus that anything other than AT is going to be cross-platform, while AT is NOT.

No advice on a gigabit router, either. Lots of them out there, usually much more expensive than 10/100 routers, and of course no telling whether they support AppleTalk, Google, google, google!

[CIA]

What's your current setup? Are you using a Linksys now? Is it wired or unwired? Does it seem to work for appletalk and airtunes out of the box? If so, what model number is it?

[ghporter]

Linksys BEFSR43 wired router with a Linksys WAP54G wireless access point wired to it. I do not have a need for AirTunes so I don't have hardware at the stereo end to stream to. However I do know that Linksys makes their own media adapter, so the AirTunes KIND of function is possible. I do not think that an AirPort Express will work with a Linksys router for AirTunes.

I don't use AppleTalk, either, but since AT is supposed to work seamlessly over ethernet (via the EtherTalk link access protocol), it should work with any standards-compliant router. That's no guarantee that it will, just that it should.

On the other hand, I'm sitting here right now typing on my MBP, my wife is across the room with her iBook and my son's on his desktop PC. We can share files without any hassle and it all works really well. I'm sorry I can't tell you how AirTunes might work with this hardware, nor how AppleTalk works, but I'm sure someone will chime in and provide their experiences.